Read At Your Own Risk
by katiesparks
Summary: You have been warned. I'd like to think everyone writes something like this at one time or another. But I had fun, that's the important part, right? No? Well, fine! Just click it already and stop reading the stupid summary! Geez! Slight hints of HK


**Everyone writes one of these at some point......  
**

"The deceased is one Halley Hallows, age eighteen and on vacation from America to meet up with some internet friends." Heiji recited and Conan nodded grimly. He looked over his shoulder at the group of teenagers that had been traveling with the girl.

There were four of them in all, a blonde and brunette who appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties and a young man with dark hair who appeared to be about the same age. The last of them was a younger brunette who couldn't have been older than fifteen at most. She was standing in the middle of the group and seemed to be dictating it, though Conan couldn't pick up most of the conversation, which was being spoken in rapid fire English that he couldn't make out due to the odd tones in which they were speaking. Sighing, and resolving himself to the headache he would get for it, he approached the man first.

"Who are you?" he asked in English.

Conan looked up at him, putting a childish smile on his face. "I'm Conan. What's your name?" He said in his own heavily accented English and the man groaned.

"Katie!" the man called and the younger girl swirled around, excusing herself from the conversation she was having with the other two.

"Yes, Nathan?" she asked and Conan noted her accent was not the same as his, her syllables were longer and she made a small, almost unnoticed noise at the end of her sentences.

"Talk with him. I can't understand him at all." He said, gesturing at the child in front of him.

Conan looked behind him at Heiji, who was still examining the body, before turning to smile at the girl. "Hi, I'm Conan.. Is your name Katie?"

"Anata wa eego hansese mas ka?" the girl said and Conan glared at her.

"I _am _speaking English!" he said and a slight bolt of recognition went through her eyes.

"And people say my accent's bad!" she exclaimed. She crotched down to be eye-level with him then and smiled kindly. "I'm sorry, little boy; I can't hardly understand what you're saying. You're speaking English, I can tell, but your accent is horrible and I'm afraid I don't know what you're trying to ask me." She said, speaking slowly so that he could hear the affliction in her voice even more clearly that before.

Suddenly, a hand clamped down on his shoulder and he tensed, before discovering it belonged to the other detective who grinned at the young teen in front of him. "Hello, miss, do you mind if I ask you and your friends a few questions?"

Her face lit up. "'Course not! Though I'm not sure if you'll be able to understand them, their not native speakers, you see, I can barely understand them; my brother keeps asking me to interpret what they're saying for him."

Conan sulked at the fact that she had understood Hattori immediately, but did not say anything. "That man there is your brother?"

"Yes, that's my older brother, Nathan. What do you need to know? I hope we figure out what happened to poor Halley-chan, she barely got permission to come at all; her parents will be so upset!"

"Halley-chan? Aren't you American? And can you slow down some; it's hard to follow you, your accent is strange." Heiji said and she grinned apologetically.

"I'm sorry, I'm from the South and I have a slight speech problem. My brother doesn't have an accent, but he isn't very charismatic, he has horrible social skills. And, well, we're anime fangirls. Online, calling someone using the honorifics is a great honor, it shows that you trust them, consider them a friend or, if you use something like –sama, consider them one of the Fandom Greats."

"Okay. Can you answer for me why exactly you guys were here today?" Heiji asked and she nodded.

"Yes. My brother came over here looking for a job. He heard that Japanese companies like to have some American spokespeople, for the foreigners who visit. I've always wanted to come to Japan, so I begged my parents and they agreed. I told my friends online what I was doing and they said that they wanted to meet up with us here because they were already planning a trip to Japan, for sightseeing and stuff. Finally, Halley-chan heard all of us were going and her parents agreed to let her come, they actually came with her but they're shopping right now and their cells don't work on this side of the globe. So, since we were all gonna be here, we decided to meet up together at this hotel. Nathan said he would decide if they could be trusted or not and, if her thought they could, he'd leave me to sightsee with them while he went to his job interview. But then this happened...." she trailed off.

"What's your name? And the other two's names? And then, could you tell me what show you are fans of?" Heiji asked and she nodded after each question.

"Of course. My name is Katelin Burdett, but everyone here calls me Katie because it's my online name and my baby name; that's why my brother uses it. I call him Nay or Naynay sometimes; it's how we are. The blonde one is Ceara Dict and the brunette is Yarah Dark. We're Hell Girl fans, mystery fans in general, really."

"I need to talk with them other two for a minute, do you mind translating if I have trouble?" Heiji asked and she nodded, skipping over to her friends and informing them what was going on and just screaming it across the room at her brother rather than walking over to him. He looked annoyed but made no comment.

Several minutes later, Heiji and Conan slipped off to the next room over. "You know who did it, Hattori?"

Heiji looked sad but nodded. "It's the one named Yarah, for sure. Did you see how pale and sick she looked? And the story they mentioned, did you see the look on her face? And how fast she volunteered to finish it?"

"Yes, I bet the dead one plagiarized it, they're writers, that kind of thing burns them." Conan said and Heiji nodded. "No choice, you have to turn her in. Don't become attached, Hattori."

"Ah, but she's just so...! Did you see how much she looks up to them? She's no more than a kid, Kudo, how do you expect me to say that her friend murdered someone right in front of her? She idolizes them!" Hattori exclaimed and scratched his head in frustration.

"She's naïve, for sure, but she deserves to know the truth." Conan said sternly.

"We couldn't just wait?" Heiji asked and Conan shook his head.

"No we can't. We're doing this, Hattori, now." Conan said and Heiji sighed but stood up and walked out, back into the room where the others waited.

"I know who did it. It was Miss Yarah Dark. She lured the deceased here, telling her that she was going to tell her secret, which we assume was the plagiarizing of the story you were discussing earlier. Once she got her here, they talked and finally, Yarah said something about this phone number, which seems to belong to a publishing company in America. Because they didn't have any paper, Yarah wrote the number on Halley's arm. But, what Halley didn't know was that the ink had been mixed with poison. While she was writing, Yarah purposely slipped and scratched her fellow writer's arm with the pen, getting the poison into her blood stream. Within minutes, she was dead." Heiji said, speaking slowly and carefully. Katie repeated the deduction back to her companions, each word coming slower and slower and finally, Katie turned and looked at the brunette writer, tears in the corners of her eyes and a betrayed look on her face.

"Yarah-chan?" the girl said, her voice quivering.

"I didn't do it, Katie-chan!" Yarah exclaimed and this, at least, Heiji could understand.

"Yes, you did. The proof is on your hands and written all over your face! On your hand is a stain from the ink, where you brushed across the still wet numbers you wrote on her arm! If we test it, we'll discover for sure that it contains the same poison as the ink on her arm. And we don't even have to test it, I can tell because of how pale you are; the poison has soaked through your skin, causing you to become sick. Admit to it now, Yarah, and we can drive you to the hospital on your way to prison."

"Yarah-chan, why? Halley-chan would've stopped if you asked her to. She would've stopped!" Katie exclaimed.

"Katie-chan calm down..." Ceara said, placing a hand on the girl's arm that she shook off harshly.

"No! Why, Yarah-chan?!" Katie yelled and Yarah wouldn't meet the girl in the eyes.

"But she wouldn't stop, Katie-chan. I asked her again and again, but she _wouldn't!_ She told me she was going to get it published, was going to become a rich American writer off of _my story _that I slaved over for hours, that I bled for. I couldn't let that happen. So I tricked her. I told her that I would be happy if only my story got published, even if it wasn't under my name. I just asked that she thank me in the Acknowledgments and then I offered her the number. After that.....well, you know the rest. I couldn't let her do it, become rich off of my story that I had put so much into. It would've been impossible for me." Yarah said quietly and, because his sister was quivering with rage and tears, Nathan interpreted for Heiji and Conan.

"That's no excuse! To take someone's life over a story! You should be ashamed!" Heiji exclaimed.

"Shut up! You don't know what it's like, to be a writer! To have characters that you care about as if they were your own children. When you are a writer, you bleed for your characters, just like you would bleed for your children. Would you stand for your child to be kidnapped? No! I did what I had to do!" Yarah exclaimed.

"I know what it's like though." Katie said quietly. "My characters, my babies. I loved them from the moment I created them, before I had even named them. They were important to me and, for every pain I caused them, it reflected a hundred times on me. I would've done most anything for my story, for my characters......But I would've never killed for them. There's a line I refuse to cross. I thought that was a understanding between us all, Yarah-chan."

"The same goes for me. I feel every blow I inflict on my characters, on my stories. But I would never inflict those blows on someone else." Ceara said, standing beside the younger girl.

Tears began to build in Yarah's eyes. "I thought that you two, of all people, would be on the same side as me. Would side with me. What Halley did was unforgivable-."

"What _you _did was unforgivable! You could've sued her, could've stole the files off her computer, could've taken the manuscript! Anything else, but what do you do? You kill her! You kill her! And that's one thing I could never understand, never understand it at all!" Katie exclaimed and ran from the room.

Later, after Yarah had been taken away by the police, Heiji found the teenager in one of the emergency stairwells, sobbing silently to herself.

"Katie..." he said and she moaned and turned away from him.

"I didn't want to do that in front of you, you seemed to have grown on me, but I had to. What you said in there took a lot of courage. You friend, Halley, would be proud of you for standing up for her like that." Heiji said.

"How do you do it, Heiji? How do you forget that that body in there was a person; that someone died right there?" Katie asked quietly.

"It takes a lot of practice. You shouldn't try to learn that certain ability. It would be unbearable, if I didn't have someone to keep me in line." Heiji said, thinking of a certain ponytailed girl who was likely very annoyed with him right now. He was late for the trip to the mall he'd promised her because of this case.

"Your girlfriend? I saw a picture of her in you wallet when you were showing you id to the police officer. She's pretty." Katie said and he blushed.

"Kazuha's _not _my girlfriend." He said and she giggled, raising her head from her knees.

"Sure she isn't. If I give you my number, will you call me when you two get together? I think you'd make such a cute couple." Katie said, a teasing, but knowing, smile on her face.

Heiji blushed darker. "It isn't going to happen! But sure, I guess. But you can't write the number on my arm!"

**...or that's what I'm going to tell myself! This is goofy, I know, but I'm going to post it anyways! The Katie in the story is **_**not **_**based off me, but rather, a younger me fused with my younger cousin's more volatile personalities. So, big thanks to them for letting me borrow their personalities and mess with them! Also, all the characters in this story were based off authors in our fandom. (I know it says Hell Girl, but I couldn't put Conan, now could I?) See if you can guess who is who. (A hint, they are **_**not **_**any of the big shot authors. Though they should be, seeing as they are amazing. The names were rather difficult themselves and the mystery itself is a bit childish, but I'm not Gosho, I can't think up a bazillion impossible mysteries at the drop of the hat!)**


End file.
